Lac-Mégantic: Makeshift pharmacy set up

Claude Charron, local pharmacist and owner of the Jean Coutu in Lac-Mégantic speaks to reporters in front of Polyvalente Montignac Sunday, July 7, 2013.Peter McCabe
/ The Gazette

Volunteers pass out water Sunday to those who wait outside Polyvalente Montignac in Lac-Mégantic. Everyone is pitching in; local pharmacist Claude Charron rented premises and was up and running dispensing prescriptions Sunday morning.Peter McCabe
/ The Gazette

Onlookers watch the smoke over the town of Lac-Mégantic, 100 kilometres east of Sherbrooke, after a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded on Saturday, July 6, 2013.Dario Ayala
/ The Gazette

A timeline of events surrounding the train derailment and fire in Lac-Mégantic Saturday morning.

This story was published July 7, 2013.

LAC-MÉGANTIC — On Saturday night, Claude Charron and his wife slept on a cot in the hallway of their local high school.

He wasn’t sure when he’d be able to go home, he didn’t know how many dozens of his friends were missing, but he knew his drugstore had been ravaged by the freight train blast that rolled through main street earlier that day.

By Sunday morning, Charron was back in business.

Charron owns a pharmacy that serves nearly everyone in town and he says that even in the face of disaster, his customers need their medicine. Whether it’s heart pills, chemotherapy treatments or just plain old penicillin, the people of Lac-Mégantic have needs, he said.

“It wasn’t a choice, these are my people, I’ve served them for 43 years,” Charron told The Gazette. “I have about 7,000 to 8,000 customers a week and they’re all going through a crisis. Some of them fled their homes with just the clothes on their backs. No time to grab anything. I always tell them to take their medicine no matter what and now it’s my job to make sure they do exactly that.”

Working out of an abandoned clinic he rented on Laval St., Charron’s pharmacy was already renewing prescriptions early Sunday. The operation isn’t terribly complicated: two cashiers share a tin box and a calculator to handle transactions. Another employee takes prescriptions and tracks down patients on a cellphone while a pharmacist is on hand to give medical advice.

Because Charron lost his entire stock in the explosion, he gets his resupply from a Jean Coutu pharmacy in neighbouring Saint-Georges-de-Beauce. The employees make several trips a day, loading their cars with medicine and taking it back to the makeshift drugstore, just a few kilometres from the site of the fatal train derailment.

“My employees are getting paid on Monday like they always do and I promised each one of them that they won’t miss a day of work if they don’t want to,” Charron said. “We’re like a family.”

Earlier in the day, Charron had fought back tears when he believed an employee of his was killed in the fire. The man had attended a casino night in a downtown bar that was razed by the shock wave Saturday.

Another employee was thought to have died in the explosion but escaped after jumping out of her window as balls of flames descended on the city.

“You grieve for these people because you care about them,” Charron said. “I met with the employees last night and it wasn’t easy. But now that we know everyone’s OK, it makes things better moving forward.”

As Charron oversaw deliveries and tried to retrofit the office space into a functional pharmacy, a longtime customer dropped in to pick up his heart medication. Paul Leclerc, 83, lost everything in the fire and he says he escaped death by the skin of his teeth.

The scene he described sounded like a passage from the Old Testament.

“My dog woke me up, I got out of bed and headed to the front door and saw a wall of fire rolling at my house,” he said. “My garage was on fire, the neighbour’s house was in flames. I didn’t have time to do anything but grab my dog and run for the car. By the time I turned the corner, I looked back to see my house had been engulfed in flames. It just melted in an instant, just like that.”

Leclerc says he’s happy to be alive and suffered only a minor burn to his head. But in the panic to get out the door, he lost one of his two dogs, forgot his dentures, his wallet and just about every valuable thing he owns.

“I got lucky, I’m upset I lost everything, but I got lucky,” he said, brandishing a long list of medication he would need to have processed.

A woman in a lab coat approached Leclerc and apologized that his medicine wouldn’t be available until later that afternoon. He shrugged her apology off, smiled and walked out the door. Life goes on, he said.

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